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My understanding is that ironhide and bumblebee are nvidia-specific hacks, while this is proper hotplug implementation for X.

Example of things that could be possible with it (maybe, hopefully):
A new driver for a graphics card is installed. Instead of closing all my apps, logging out, shutting down X, removing the old driver from the kernel, loading the new one, starting X and then ending up with all my apps closed, a single command reloads the driver, the screen blinks and it's *done*. It works like this on Windows already.

Looks like now it supports weird USB graphics cards. Not bad. The bumblebee/ironhide stuff could be nicely integrated into X drivers eventually... at least that's what I'm hoping for

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and imagine how even more awesome that would become if perfect offload and balancing between several GPUs be made while rendering to output from one of them!
not only all those on-boards chips would become useful again but that would be a clean vendor-independent replacement for shit like Crossfire and such. of course its performance would be all about memory and it's a bitch to copy memory via motherboards buses instead of direct connection so, it's mostly about raw computing.

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A new driver for a graphics card is installed. Instead of closing all my apps, logging out, shutting down X, removing the old driver from the kernel, loading the new one, starting X and then ending up with all my apps closed, a single command reloads the driver, the screen blinks and it's *done*. It works like this on Windows already.

Could you be more precise here, please?

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and imagine how even more awesome that would become if perfect offload and balancing between several GPUs be made while rendering to output from one of them!
not only all those on-boards chips would become useful again but that would be a clean vendor-independent replacement for shit like Crossfire and such. of course its performance would be all about memory and it's a bitch to copy memory via motherboards buses instead of direct connection so, it's mostly about raw computing.

Some of us had been waiting for this for years since both Nvidia and AMD announced hybrid graphics. I've wanted to be able to kick back to the IGP when 3D wasn't needed and shut down the dedicated GPU card to save on heat and power as well as make the IGP at least marginally useful as a GPGPU while using the GPU card for 3D, much like Nvidia's PhysX spare GPU coprocessor.

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Sure. Last time I installed Windows 7, it had some crap old nvidia driver already. After installing a new one, no reboots were required (the equivalent of the messing around with kernel modules). The screen turned off for a second when the graphics card restarted and the running apps didn't even notice. I really wish this was possible with X... and it looks like it will be. There's no reason why it shouldn't be possible apart from legacy design problems, which can be solved

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Hopefully hot-plugging will be standardized and done for all kinds of devices in the future. Not just graphics cards.
(think about audio-cards)

Hotplug of both GPUs and most other devices already works at the kernel level. You can plug in a USB sound card or mouse today and it will work. It's really only X that doesn't deal with GPU hotplug (X input hotplug already works for the most part).